On Thursday, Delaware’s losing and winning candidates will meet in Georgetown, for Return Day, a tradition since 1791. Officials used to announce state electoral results at this unity carnival while serving what an 1888 state history called “all kinds of edibles … opossum … rabbit meat,” and “OX ROAST SANDWICHES fresh from an all-night open pit barbecue.” Such festivities restore civility, emphasizing the patriotic bonds that unite us despite the partisan differences that divide us.

Although most candidates learn their fates on election night, this state holiday still celebrates the common ground that often needs rebuilding after intense campaigns, while now serving roast beef instead of ox. As rivals parade together in antique cars or horse-drawn carriages and party leaders bury a hatchet together, literally, they act out a healing ritual we all could use.

Gracious concessions, even if insincere, also legitimize the results and our democracy. Stephen Douglas urged the South to accept Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860. William Jennings Bryan telegrammed William McKinley in 1896 acknowledging that the people’s “will is law.”

Al Smith delivered the first real presidential concession speech in 1928. Overlooking Republicans’ anti-Catholic bigotry, Smith respected majority rule, saying that Herbert Hoover would not be “the president of the Republican Party but the president of the United States.”

After close elections, losers have often made self-sacrificing calculations to concede for the sake of the nation. Perhaps surprisingly, Richard Nixon acted nobly in 1960. Republicans were so convinced that John Kennedy had won fraudulently that President Dwight Eisenhower offered to raise money for a recount. Nixon realized a “recount would require up to half a year,” undermining the “legitimacy of Kennedy’s election” in ways that “could be devastating to America’s foreign relations.” Refusing to “subject the country to such a situation,” Nixon gave the speech every candidate dreads delivering, promising Kennedy “my wholehearted support.”

After losing in 2008, John McCain graciously acknowledged “the special significance” of Barack Obama’s election. Days later, McCain quipped: “I’ve been sleeping like a baby. Sleep two hours, wake up and cry. Sleep two hours, wake up and cry.”

No one expects Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton to jaunt around together in some Delaware jalopy right after Election Day. Still, Americans need their leadership. Buried hatchets can be retrieved eventually: The main mission of American politics remains ensuring effective governance. Rather than undermining democracy by grumbling about rigged or stolen elections, the candidates must follow Delaware and apply the balm of patriotism to the wounds partisanship has gouged into the body politic.

Gil Troy is a professor of history at McGill University and the editor, with Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Fred Israel, of “History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-2008.”

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Continued

Donald J. Trump was elected with a higher percentage of the white evangelical vote than any other Republican presidential candidate has ever received, and he has received strong support from prominent Christian Right leaders. Yet if Mr. Trump delivers on his promises, he will not give the religious right what its leaders have traditionally demanded or what the Republican Party platform calls for. Indeed, he will give them very little national legislation at all, but will instead offer them maximum latitude to pursue their agenda at the state level — a shift that may portend a potential breakthrough in the nation’s polarizing culture wars.

National legislation has long been the goal of the religious right. When the movement emerged in the late 1970s, evangelical leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson sought federal constitutional amendments to ban abortion and restore school prayer, because they wanted to reverse what liberal rights activists had done at the national level through the Supreme Court. In the early 21st century, leaders such as James Dobson continued this trend by persuading President George W. Bush to endorse a constitutional amendment proposal to define marriage as exclusively heterosexual.

In recent years, evangelicals have become so concerned about protecting their own religious liberty against federal mandates or court decisions that they have given less attention to imposing a moral agenda on the rest of the nation. Although the Republican Party platform continues to promise a constitutional amendment protecting human life from the moment of conception, the pro-life movement has not made any serious attempts to pass that amendment since the 1980s. Nor has there been much talk in the last decade of a national ban on same-sex marriage.

Mr. Trump is well positioned to promote a further shift away from national moral regulation. For much of his adult life, he held culturally libertarian views on abortion and gay rights, and he evinced little interest in the religious right’s agenda. Early in his campaign, he expressed discomfort with conservative evangelicals’ opposition to the rights of transgender people to use the public restroom of their choice. But he quickly came to embrace a “states’ rights” position on same-sex marriage and transgender rights, a position that would allow culturally liberal New Yorkers the right to pursue different policies than cultural conservatives in Mississippi or North Dakota. And while Mr. Trump stumbled over abortion during his campaign, the policy that he ultimately reverted to was to leave abortion legalization up to the states — an outcome that he would try to ensure by nominating conservative Supreme Court justices who might overturn Roe v. Wade.

Mr. Trump has gone further than any previous Republican presidential nominee in a generation in insisting that the religious right should enact its agenda at the state, rather than federal, level. Although this was the policy position of many Republicans during the 1970s (including President Gerald Ford), religious right activists persuaded the G.O.P. in the early 1980s to abandon its states-rights approach to abortion and other social issues, and promise national legislation to implement the religious right’s agenda. Mr. Trump is leading the party back to its more traditional stance.

While many liberals will find this outcome unsatisfactory — since it offers them no opportunity to secure national protection for individual rights that they consider inalienable — it may be the only compromise solution that can give both conservatives and liberals the freedom to pursue their own agenda at the local level without fear of a national backlash.

If a socially libertarian New Yorker can deliver this compromise to the conservative white rural evangelical voters who put him in office, both conservatives and liberals should see that for what it is: a landmark opportunity to move beyond the culture wars.

Daniel K. Williams is a professor of history at the University of West Georgia and the author of “God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right.”

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King Salman, right, of Saudi Arabia, meeting with General Joseph Dunford, U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in Riyadh on November 8, 2016.Credit
Reuters

Just when the people of the Middle East thought things couldn’t get any worse, Donald J. Trump is elected president of the United States. Now, their apprehension about the president-elect dwarfs their disappointment with President Obama.

It could be a blessing in disguise.

America, in one magic moment, you’ve revealed how you’ve changed. For the worse. Poor you, you feel so insecure, vulnerable and fragile. Like the rest of us.

So, instead of reaching for your famed “can-do” spirit, lifting yourselves up by the bootstraps, you turned to a strident, bellicose type of nationalism. The kind usually associated with strutting generalissimos of Third World nations with their chests covered with made-up, self-awarded medals.

Maybe the people of the Middle East will look and realize that you are no longer the Great Democracy to emulate. That your modern style of empire and your role as keeper of the world order for the world’s own good are stumbling and failing, even in your own eyes; and that we in the Middle East should not be turning to you for rescue.

For as long as I can remember, you’ve been on a self-assigned mission to change the Middle East. Indeed, the world. Now, it seems as if the change has flowed the other way.

You’ve voted to reduce your liberties. To narrow the range of people entitled to justice and equality before the law. To live in a place where the police should not be criticized; where fighting political correctness is more important than fighting racism; where Muslims are suspected and people who appear Hispanic can be rounded up if they’re not carrying their papers.

In this election you’ve revealed that your people — like Russians, Hungarians, Iraqis, Iranians and others whose politics you normally look down on — will choose a narrow, nonsensical nationalist ethos when they feel threatened by uncertainty. Your imperial outreach allowed you to experience other cultures, but now you’ve chosen to shrink your outlook, with the expectation that the world will continue to revolve around you. It won’t.

Like the rest of us, you’re now divided between those who want to make their nation great again alone and those who want to make it great together.

O.K., enough about you; let’s talk about us. We in the Middle East can’t decipher what exactly your incoming president wants from us. I don’t think he knows, either.

Mr. Trump said he would bring back torture and ban Muslims from entering America, and he compared the threat of “radical Islam” to Soviet Communism. He wants less engagement in the region, and fewer “free riders” like the Saudis who don’t pay enough for American protection. And he wants the United States to abandon the costly nation-building in the Middle East.

What nation-building? In Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia, civil wars continue unabated. The Arab and Muslim worlds only hope the United States stops contributing to the destruction.
Mr. Trump does not exactly seem concerned for the wishes of Middle Easterners and their right to live in peace. It sounds more like what he really wants to do is pal around with other strutting, authoritarian types. Expect him to cozy up to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, and join him in supporting Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad.

Expect America’s new president to work closely with Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr. Trump has embraced Mr. Netanyahu’s positions on Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and on abandoning the two-state solution. Instead of Americanizing the Middle East, Mr. Trump seems set on “Israelizing” America, stirring fear of Muslims and trying to wall out “the other.”

Arabs, and Middle Easterners in general, should take one quick look and figure out how to be less dependent on the United States, and how to resolve their conflicts within their own, regional frameworks.
Finally, some good news. President Obama has assured us that the sun will rise tomorrow, regardless. And if the Trump presidency is as bad as I expect it to be — though not so bad that it demolishes democracy entirely — he can be voted out in four years.

Meanwhile, fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a hell of a ride.

Marwan Bishara is senior political analyst at Al Jazeera and the author of “The Invisible Arab: The Promise and Peril of the Arab Revolutions.”

A commitment to human rights has been a fundamental precept of NATO since the alliance was created a half century ago. You would not expect that a founding member would have to be reminded of that fact. Certainly not the United States, for all those years the leader of NATO and an inspirational embodiment of its core values.

Yet this is where we find ourselves now, the day after Donald Trump won the presidency: In congratulating him on his victory, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany felt compelled to set conditions for cooperation.

“Germany and America are connected by values of democracy, freedom and respect for the law and the dignity of man, independent of origin, skin color, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political views,” she said in a statement, adding: “I offer the next President of the United States close cooperation on the basis of these values.”

Mr. Trump’s behavior during his campaign was antithetical to those values. He has threatened to ban Muslims from the United States, refuse refugees, deport 11 million undocumented workers and build a wall on the border with Mexico. He has disparaged African Americans, Mexican Americans, women and people with disabilities.

Moreover, Mr. Trump has called into question America’s commitment to NATO and displayed a befuddling penchant for defending Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, who is waging war in eastern Ukraine and destabilizing other parts of Europe by supporting far-right groups.

He received no pushback on Wednesday from Theresa May, the British prime minister, who simply congratulated Mr. Trump on his win. The two leaders’ reactions were further proof that, after Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, we will have to look to Mrs. Merkel not just to lead Europe but to replace America in leading NATO as well.

“I am scared that if Ronald Reagan gets into office, we are going to see more of the Ku Klux Klan and a resurgence of the Nazi Party,” Coretta Scott King said in November, 1980. “I’m afraid things are going to blow sky high during this next term,” a nursing student said. He’s a “nitwit,” added a Democrat. “He’s shallow, superficial and frightening,” one of that year’s historic numbers of “undecideds” insisted.

Ronald Reagan “seems not to relish complexity and subtlety,” the New York Times editorial endorsing President Jimmy Carter’s re-election proclaimed. “The problem is not a loose lip but the simple answer.” While fearing what Reagan’s own running mate, George H.W. Bush, had dismissed as Reagan’s “voodoo economics” during their primary fight, the editorial board feared “voodoo diplomacy,” too.

From coast to coast, half of a divided nation abhorred — and underestimated — the president-elect. “The American people,“ Hamilton Jordan, a key Carter aide, said, "are not going to elect a 70-year-old, right-wing, ex-movie actor to be president.”

Pollsters reported in 1980 that “More voters held negative attitudes toward each presidential candidate than in any campaign since polling began” — a record we just broke in 2016. The economic dislocation of galloping inflation and the energy crisis produced a nasty campaign. Feeling neglected by Washington, millions embraced Ronald Reagan’s populism.

Despite the Democratic panic, Ronald Reagan left America richer and safer after two terms as president. Reagan defied expectations by turning toward the center. He acted as president of the United States, not president of the Republican Party. Reagan used the transition period to heal wounds while claiming a broad policy mandate, despite winning only 50.7 percent of the popular vote. He vowed to “rebuild a bipartisan base for American foreign policy.”

His cabinet choices were so moderate that Pat Buchanan, the conservative flamethrower whose rhetorical bluster anticipated the advent of Donald Trump, lamented: “Where is the dash, color, and controversy — the customary concomitants of a Reagan campaign?” Just weeks into Reagan’s first term, conservatives were demanding that his aides had to “Let Reagan be Reagan,” meaning: stop being so reasonable.

But in adjusting, in tempering, Reagan was being Reagan. He knew the Constitution limited presidential powers — and he faced a Democratic Congress led by the formidable speaker of the House Tip O’Neill to remind him further. Illustrating Richard Neustadt’s lesson that the power of the president is mostly “the power to persuade,” many of Reagan’s achievements were symbolic. Rather than shrinking government as he promised, for example, he only lowered the federal government’s growth rate.

History is not destiny. And Reagan had both a lighter touch than Mr. Trump, and eight years’ experience as governor of California. Still, history is full of shifts and surprises. Mr. Trump must be a healer and unite America, as he tried doing in his victory speech. If he fails, the checks and balances that sometimes help crusading ideologues become effective leaders can ultimately impose a necessary gridlock.

When asked about conservatives’ frustration with him, Reagan kindly insisted it was only a “very few” critics. He said: “There are some people who think that you should, on principle, jump off the cliff with the flag flying if you can’t get everything you want.” Reagan recalled that “If I found when I was governor that I could not get 100 percent of what I asked for, I took 80 percent.” So far, Mr. Trump, the political amateur and sputtering demagogue, has lacked Reagan’s magnanimity or his flexibility. Can the reality-show star turned president-elect mimic the actor turned president?

Gil Troy is a professor of history at McGill University and the author of "Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s.”

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President Lyndon Johnson, right, confers with President-elect Richard Nixon in the White House, on December 12, 1968.Credit
Charles Tasnadi/Associated Press

In 1968, there was a demand among voters for change, especially regarding Vietnam and foreign policy, and there was a backlash against some of the Great Society programs. Then, as now, the Democratic candidate was tied to the departing administration and hamstrung to differentiate a new set of policies.

As a result, the Democratic presidential nominee, Hubert H. Humphrey, narrowly lost to the Republican, Richard M. Nixon, a candidate who was despised by a large percentage of the electorate.

One positive outcome of that election was the first organized transition from the departing to incoming governments. President Lyndon B. Johnson always believed that, after an election, Democrats and Republicans should come together to do what’s right for the country.

At the time, I was President Johnson’s appointments secretary, the position that has since evolved into the White House chief of staff. Right after the 1968 results came in, the president put me in charge of organizing a transition process, something that had never been done. “Nixon is an S.O.B., but he’s the only president we’ll have,” Johnson told me. “I want him and all of his team to be fully prepared to govern after the Inauguration at 12 noon on January 20.”

A few days later, Johnson and Nixon met at the White House along with Nixon’s top advisers, including H. R. Haldeman and John Mitchell. There we mapped out a program in which all of the Johnson cabinet and major White House staff members would brief their incoming counterparts as often as was desired by the new administration.

My charge was to work with Haldeman, who became my successor at the White House, to make sure these briefings occurred across the new administration and in a timely fashion. One surprise was that Nixon told me that Mitchell could speak for him in all matters if he was not available. Johnson would have never delegated such authority, but that was the difference in the management style of the two men.

While a smooth transition was important to Johnson, he didn’t stop being president. He was issuing orders and making appointments right up to the morning of the Inauguration. In fact, the day before the Inauguration the president told me to find out how many vacancies existed on commissions and boards and find good people that he could nominate. He kept Nixon waiting in the Blue Room on Inauguration morning while he signed those nominations (which required Senate confirmation) and had them delivered to the Congress before noon.

It is a positive sign that President Obama invited Donald J. Trump to meet at the White House two days after this most contentious election. Today transitions are much more institutional now than our first one in 1968. But this process can heal many wounds and start bringing our country closer together. That’s imperative if we want to make our government work for the people again.

Back in 1968, Johnson and Nixon left the White House together, along with Senator Everett Dirksen and me. We jumped into the car and headed to the Capitol. Surprisingly, Nixon wanted only to discuss how disappointed he was to have lost Texas (Johnson’s home state) and how determined he was to win it in1972.

I hope the ride to the Capitol next January will be more substantive on policy.

James R. Jones is a former congressman from Oklahoma who served on the Guantánamo Task Force.

If anything has been made clear by the results of this election, it is that the political and pundit class have underestimated the degree of anger and pain in the United States, the degree to which “recovery” has been recovery for a few and stagnation and decline for many more.

One exit poll has been haunting me since I saw it: The Reuters/Ipsos early exit poll found that 75 percent of respondents agreed “America needs a strong leader to take the country back from the rich and powerful.” Only slightly fewer agreed that “the American economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful,” and — perhaps the kicker — 68 percent believed that “traditional parties and politicians don’t care about people like me.”

There’s a lot to unpack in those statements. They may conceal white resentment of the perceived advancement past them of black and Latino people. But they also reveal the sentiment that has been there since the 2008 financial crisis laid bare the lines of power in the country and the world — when, as the protest chant went, “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out.”

The downward trends have been with us for decades: the divergence of productivity gains from workers’ incomes, the substitution of credit card debt for raises, the shift of good union jobs and family wages and pensions into low-wage service jobs, and the attendant slashing of the social safety net. But the past eight years sped all that up and made it impossible to ignore.

If Donald J. Trump stood out to voters from the rest of the Republican Party, aside from a willingness to say directly the kinds of things usually carefully dogwhistled, it was in his rants about trade and his lack of interest in dismantling the remnants of the welfare state. For white Americans anxiously looking at their disappearing stability, Mr. Trump was a bomb they were willing to throw at a system they felt was failing them. He emotionally echoed their outrage and gave them a place to direct their anger, the age-old right-wing populist trick of refracting it both upward at elites and downward at minorities.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the mainstream Democratic Party were woefully unprepared to greet this wave. When your response to a cry of “Make America Great Again!” is “America Is Already Great!” you’d better be sure that it feels true to a majority of voters. The results show that it did not.

To be sure, Democrats had an uneasy line to walk, between maintaining continuity with a still-popular, twice-elected Barack Obama — a continuity that won Mrs. Clinton the Democratic primary — and reaching the people who wanted and needed change. But the party’s wholehearted backing of Mrs. Clinton was a colossal misreading of a moment when rage at the establishment (of both parties) was simmering everywhere.

That rage should have been visible as Mr. Trump ran away with the Republican nomination process despite the opposition of that party’s grandees, and as Bernie Sanders pushed Mrs. Clinton much harder than anyone had expected a gray-haired socialist from Vermont to do. But Mrs. Clinton opened her arms to disaffected Republicans rather than wooing the disaffected within and around her own party. Most of the television ads she ran were more about painting Trump as a dangerous aberration, an outsider unfit for office, than pitching any plan of her own for change.

Democrats failed to realize that for many Trump voters, that was exactly what they liked about him.

Sarah Jaffe is a reporting fellow at the Nation Institute and the author of “Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt.”

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Donald Trump on stage at the Republican National Convention.Credit
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

It may not be an exaggeration to say that Donald Trump both knows and cares less about the details of public policy than anyone ever elected president of the United States. This just goes to show that “politics is not about policy,” as Robin Hanson, the futurist and social theorist, likes to say.

Mr. Trump’s playbook against Hillary Clinton broke with the hard-won norms of liberal democracy, went back to demagogic, authoritarian political basics, and updated them for the reality television, social media age.

Politics is, at bottom, about factions vying and coordinating to choose leaders in whom to invest authority. Throughout the campaign, Mr. Trump displayed an uncanny and unnerving mastery of the primal politics of authority, and the game of legitimizing his own and delegitimizing his rivals’ claims to authority.

In Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump drew a general election opponent pre-weakened by a decades-long Republican campaign of delegitimization. He took advantage of it with shameless audacity, making the most of our culture’s lingering sexism and the popular perception of Mrs. Clinton as a member of an arrogant and corrupt elite that believes it is above the law.

But tearing down his opponents was only half of Trump’s equation. The pundits and pollsters so badly botched their predictions in no small part because they failed to grasp the intense, reality-distorting power of Donald Trump’s fame. But Mr. Trump seems to have an intuitive understanding that glamour, celebrity and gaudy wealth are key ingredients in majesty — which is inherently authoritative and underwrites its own claim to legitimacy. Trump’s self-branded personal jet was more than a convenient means of transportation for a very rich man. It was a purple silk, ermine-fringed cape, Air Force One in waiting, and he knew how to use it.

The United States, the world’s first nation founded on principled opposition to the pre-Enlightenment politics of majesty and unified authority, has deep-seated norms of republican modesty and propriety. Casting those norms aside and banking heavily on the atavistic political appeal of majestic celebrity gave Mr. Trump an advantage few us were prepared to acknowledge, allowing him to attract the support of an unforeseen numbers of black, Hispanic and female voters, despite his campaign’s naked racism and his scandalously misogynistic and abusive personal history.

Because Mr. Trump’s strategy was so indifferent to matters of policy substance, it is incredibly difficult to say what policies Mr. Trump will actually support in office. I don’t think we’ve ever known less about what an incoming president really wants to do with his power.

But we do have a clear indication of how he’s likely to wield it. He will cleverly burnish his claim to authority and relentlessly and effectively discredit his opponents, inside and outside the Republican Party, with all the tools of an executive branch that has never been more powerful and less constrained by the constitutional system America’s founders designed specifically as an alternative to and a bulwark against unitary authority.

Will Wilkinson is the vice president for policy at the Niskanen Center and a columnist at Vox.

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Hillary Clinton with her husband, Bill, after voting in Chappaqua, N.Y., on Tuesday.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

I got up on Election Day and burst into tears — not a genteel twin trickle but a great heaving burst, zero to firehose. Tears spattered the inside of my glasses, dripped from my lips, and left mascara-tinged rosettes blooming black in my cereal milk.

“Honey,” my husband crooned to me. “Honey, it’s going to be O.K. The numbers are still good. It’s O.K.”

But it wasn’t the numbers. I wasn’t sobbing because I was afraid Hillary Clinton was going to lose. That would come later. I was sobbing Tuesday morning because, as I poured my coffee, I’d caught a glimpse of a cable news interview with Mrs. Clinton just after she voted for herself in Chappaqua, N.Y. She seemed breathless, exhilarated, a little overwhelmed. Over her shoulder, Bill Clinton stared at his wife and beamed.

My husband stares at me like that sometimes. It’s not just love — we expect husbands to love their wives — but something less traditional, more conditional and gendered. It’s professional respect. It’s pride.

We’re accustomed to that pride flowing the other direction, from wife to husband, because men in our culture get to be more than just bodies, do more than just nurture. Men get to act and excel and climb and aspire and thrive and win and rule and be the audacious, hungry fulcrum of public life. It is normal for men to have ambition. It is normal for women to stand aside.

I thought about Bill Clinton meeting Hillary Rodham at Yale in 1971, and how tenacious and intense she must have been even back then, how undeniable and potent. Mr. Clinton describes the moment in his memoir. “She conveyed a sense of strength and self-possession I had rarely seen in anyone, man or woman,“ he wrote. "She was in my face from the start.” He says he once told her, during those years, “I have met all the most gifted people in our generation and you’re the best.”

And then I thought about Mr. Clinton rising steadily through his political career, on the track we have built for charismatic, competent white men. He must have known, every second, how good his wife was. Not just good, but “the best.” Better than everyone he’d ever met; better than him, even. And he watched her stand next to him and wait, and wait, and wait, underestimated and degraded and excoriated for wanting more out of life than cookies.

And she didn’t quit! She swallowed slander and humiliation and irrational hatred for three decades and she didn’t quit, and here she was, just a hair’s breadth from the presidency of the United States — the first woman ever to be trusted with the rudder of the world. He must be so proud of her, I thought. It made me cry.

I cried because I want my daughters to feel that blazing pride, that affirmation of their boundless capacity — not from their husbands, but from their world, from the atmosphere, from inviolable wells of certainty inside themselves. I cried because it’s not fair, and I’m so tired, and every woman I know is so tired. I cried because I don’t even know what it feels like to be taken seriously — not fully, not in that whole, unequivocal, confident way that’s native to handshakes between men. I cried because it does things to you to always come second.

Whatever your personal opinion of the Clintons, as politicians or as human beings, that dynamic is real. We, as a culture, do not take women seriously on a profound level. We do not believe women. We do not trust women. We do not like women.

I understand that many men cannot see it, and plenty more do not care. I know that many men will read this and laugh, or become defensive, or call me hysterical, or worse, and that’s fine. I am used to it. It doesn’t make me wrong.

But maybe this election was the beginning of something new, I thought. Not the death of sexism, but the birth of a world in which women’s inferiority isn’t a given.

That grain of hope glowed inside me until around dinner time on Tuesday, the final day of an election so openly misogynist that the question “Sexual assault: good or bad?” was credulously presented for debate.

Today doesn’t feel real. It is indistinguishable from fresh, close grief. But if there’s one lesson we can take from Mrs. Clinton, politics aside — and even Donald Trump acknowledged it in the second debate — it’s the limitlessness of human endurance. Those of us who have been left in the cold by this apparent affirmation of a white supremacist patriarchy (and sorry, white women who voted for Mr. Trump, but your shelter is illusory) are tough.

We have been weathering this hurricane wall of doubt and violence for so long, and now, more crystalline than ever, we have an enemy and a mandate. We have the smirking apotheosis of our oppression sliming, paw-first, toward our genitals. We have the popular vote. We have proof, in exit polls, that white women will pawn their humanity for the safety of white supremacy. We have abortion pills to stockpile and neighbors to protect and children to teach. We have the right woman to find. We have local elections in a year.

The fact that we lost doesn’t make us wrong; the fact that they don’t believe in us doesn’t make us disappear.

Lindy West is a columnist for The Guardian and the author of the memoir “Shrill: Notes From a Loud Woman.”

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Willie Robertson, of Duck Dynasty, on the first day of the Republican National Convention.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

A couple of years ago, I produced a reality-TV show called “Hollywood Hillbillies,” about a family from rural Georgia who, driven by the grandson’s newfound internet fame, moves west to make it in Hollywood. The show centered on the undeniable charisma of “Mema,” the foul-mouthed matriarch who spoke her mind and poked fun at the habits and attitudes of the Los Angeles elite.

The show was part of a wave of “redneck reality” shows like “Swamp People,” “Duck Dynasty,” “Bayou Billionaires” and “Moonshiners” that presented a vision of white, rural America as the last authentic place on earth, the last place untarnished by the corruption and cynicism of the elites.

“Hollywood Hillbillies” aired on the Reelz Network, a channel owned by a billionaire Republican donor Stanley Hubbard, who funded a pro-Trump “super” PAC after his preferred candidates lost the primaries. Designed as a harmless comedy, the show reveled in Mema’s provocative, off-color remarks, just as Donald J. Trump’s audience revels in his. But now I’m thinking more critically about what shows like this are selling.

All of these shows have one thing in common: While trafficking in rural stereotypes, they celebrate wealth and business success — whether that business is crafting hick-hop music, catching alligators or designing duck calls.

Ostensibly produced for middle America, they offer a population disenfranchised by globalization and the information economy a vision of rural ingenuity rewarded.

Mr. Trump based his candidacy around this population. He spoke directly to voters raised on reality TV, addressing their fears and aspirations with blunt talk. He became their perfect celebrity champion, a rich white man, his image polished by years in a reality-TV boardroom, who validated their demographic anxiety. In an election season driven more by hatred of political opponents than enthusiasm for two deeply unpopular candidates, President-Elect Donald J. Trump hated best, and won.

I am wondering today if the same embarrassment that prevents some of us from admitting that we watch “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” also kept Trump supporters from admitting to pollsters that they were voting for a man they knew the media considered a bigot.

Two months ago, I started working on a new series, “Trumpigration,” a travel show about where to move if Donald Trump somehow got elected. That, too, was designed as a lighthearted comedy. Now, facing the prospect of four years of a Trump presidency, it’s beginning to feel like the last chance to change the channel.

Seth Grossman is a filmmaker and reality television producer.

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Signs pointing to one of Hillary Clinton’s campaign offices in Miami, Fla.Credit
Scott McIntyre for The New York Times

They favored Hillary Clinton by better than two to one, according to the exit polls. They did not turn out in big numbers to protest Donald J. Trump, but it probably would not have mattered.

It turns out that Latinos were the election’s biggest losers and not just because Mr. Trump won the presidency after a long campaign of slinging threats and insults at them. The bitterest loss was dealt by the 59.5 million mostly white people who voted for Mr. Trump. That was a rejection by their own countrymen.

According to the exit polls — a rough measure of turnout at best — Latinos accounted for 11 percent of the votes cast Tuesday the same as 2012. If those numbers hold, there was little or no Trump effect, and however much the number of Latino votes increased was just a result of demography.

You may have been convinced that it would be otherwise. Years of reckless commentary, news stories and advocacy insisted that Latinos would be the great demographic firewall that would safeguard progressive politics with surging population numbers. But, the firewall only stands in a few states, and the biggest of them, California, New York and Texas, are already decided. Mr. Trump concentrated instead on the old industrial states where Latinos are a sparse presence. When he demonized Mexico and unauthorized immigrants, he gained more in the Electoral College by mobilizing white voters than he lost by alienating Latinos.

The national exit polls show that Mrs. Clinton drew 65 percent of the Latino vote compared with 29 percent for Mr. Trump. That is a landslide by any measure, and it is about the same margin in the exit polls for 2008 (67 percent vs. 31 percent). The disappointment sets in when you compare the outcome to 2012. President Barack Obama took 71 percent of the Latino vote in the exit polls that year compared with 27 percent for Mitt Romney.

Mr. Trump was supposed to be the bucket of cold water that aroused the sleeping giant, producing not only a stronger preference for the Democratic candidate but also, more important, a spike in turnout. In 2012, with immigration reform on the line, more than 12 million Latino voters stayed home, producing a turnout rate of 48 percent compared with 64 percent for whites and 67 percent for blacks.

The much ballyhooed and chronicled “Trump Effect” was supposed to have produced a surge in naturalizations and voter registration over the past year, and news organizations were churning out stories about the “surge” in Latino voting even after the polls closed Tuesday.

While more time and data is needed to get a full picture of Latino turnout this year, at first glance it appears Latino numbers were up, and perhaps significantly in some places, but that in fact the giant was barely stirred.

Four million more Latinos were eligible to vote Tuesday than in 2012. So, no matter who was running and no matter how low the turnout, the number of Latino votes counted Tuesday was virtually certain to be higher than 2012. In fact, demographic growth alone would have guaranteed Mrs. Clinton an additional 1.3 million votes (about 1 percent of the total votes cast), even if turnout remained at the same dismal rate as 2012, and she got two-thirds of the Latino votes.

In Colorado and Nevada, Latino voters surely helped keep the states blue, and under different scenarios those states could have served as the much-advertised Latino firewall. The one real bright spot for Latino Democrats Tuesday came with the election of Catherine Cortez Masto to the Senate in Nevada. That vote may illustrate what it takes to wake up the Latino electorate: a charismatic and qualified candidate, strong mediating institutions, in this case the hospitality workers’ unions in Las Vegas, and well-organized political operation like the one created by Senator Harry Reid, the retiring Democratic leader.

Meanwhile, something may have happened in Texas that needs a closer look. Mr. Trump won handily, but only by a 9 percent margin. President Obama lost the state by nearly 16 points in 2012 and by almost 12 points in 2008. A lot of non-Latino newcomers have begun to change the political complexion of the state in recent years, and that formula — newcomers plus Latinos — is what flipped Colorado and Nevada in the past.

Florida is the one place where Latinos might have been able to change the results of this election and didn’t. In the exit polls, Latinos accounted for 18 percent of the total vote compared with 17 in 2012, and the split was slightly more favorable to Mrs. Clinton than it was for President Obama four years ago. Mrs. Clinton’s vote tally was more than 200,000 higher than President Obama’s, but Mr. Trump’s was more than 400,000 higher than Mr. Romney’s.

And therein lies the result that Latinos will have to live with for the next four years. In a state that has vividly benefited from immigration and trade, a state where Latinos have for the most part prospered and contributed to the prosperity of their neighbors, white voters mobilized to elect a candidate who would angrily erase everything Latinos represent. No one else suffered that kind of defeat on Tuesday.

Roberto Suro is a professor of public policy and journalism at the University of Southern California.

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President Harry S. Truman laughing as he holds an early edition of the Chicago Tribune for Nov. 4th, 1948.Credit
Frank Cancellare/United Press International

With so many predictions about this presidential campaign having turned out to be so very wrong, comparisons to the 1948 presidential race come naturally. In that election, virtually everyone predicted that the Republican Thomas Dewey would beat the “accidental president,” the Democrat, Harry Truman.

Pollsters reinforced these assumptions. Elmer Roper announced that he was so sure Dewey would win that he wouldn’t even bother reporting poll results anymore. “My silence on this point can be construed as an indication that Mr. Dewey is still so clearly ahead that we might as well just listen to his inaugural address,” he said. George Gallup kept polling until mid-October, but then rested on those results, assuming the race was over.

Pundits agreed. Newsweek surveyed 50 of the nation’s top political reporters in October; every single one said Dewey would win. Republicans and Democrats alike assumed the race was over. On election night, the conservative Chicago Tribune was so confident it called the race early, rushing out a banner headline that would soon be as famous as it was wrong: “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

To the amazement of nearly everyone, Truman won by considerable margins. In the popular vote, he took 49.6 percent to Dewey’s 45.1 percent. In the Electoral College, he won 303 votes to Dewey’s 189. While the margins of this year’s election are narrower, the shock and confusion of pollsters and analysts seems just as pronounced.

But comparisons between the Truman and Trump campaigns are not neatly drawn. Truman was an outspoken liberal, and he campaigned on preserving and expanding the accomplishments of the New Deal welfare state. He called for expansion of Social Security, more progressive forms of taxation, a higher minimum wage, and a new national system of health insurance. Truman also committed the Democratic Party, long dominated by Southern segregationists, to a new racial liberalism. Notably, he called on Congress to protect the voting rights of African-Americans.

In foreign policy, Truman set America against the growing influence of the Soviet Union. In 1947, he announced the Truman Doctrine, which prompted economic aid to Europe through the Marshall Plan and military alliances through a new North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A year later, Truman challenged Soviet expansionism with the Berlin Airlift.

Mr. Trump has rejected much of the substance of Truman’s campaign, but in many ways he reflected its style. Truman’s famous “whistle-stop campaign” took him to rural communities and small towns where working-class and middle-class whites felt neglected. In fiery speeches with blunt language, he singled out sources of blame. Truman went after the “do nothing” Republican Congress as a prominent foe, but also denounced an array of “special interests,” including “bloodsuckers who have offices on Wall Street.” Truman named these enemies and promised to “give ’em’ hell.” His crowds believed him and rallied to their candidate. On Election Day, he predicted there were would be “a lot of surprised pollsters.” There were.

Though he had reason to gloat, Truman was gracious in victory. The day after the election, the Washington Post staff invited him to a “crow banquet.” All the newspaper pundits, radio commentators and pollsters who predicted his defeat would wear sackcloth and force down a main course of crow; the president, in white tie and tails, would be served roast turkey. Truman declined, saying he had “no desire to crow over anybody or to see anybody eat crow, figuratively or otherwise.” He added, “We should all get together now and make a country in which everybody can eat turkey whenever he pleases.”

Mr. Trump is not a politician who operates by anyone else’s playbook, but perhaps in this small but important matter, he can take a lesson from history.

Kevin M. Kruse is a professor of history at Princeton University.

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Trump supporters in Reno, Nev., celebrating Tuesday night.Credit
Max Whittaker for The New York Times

I have to admit it: I am loving it. As the results poured in for Donald J. Trump, I reveled in the Facebook friends who openly mourned the end of humanity. I felt gleeful in trolling the Twitter hashtag #HesNotMyPresident: “I’m laying in bed with tears streaming down my face, just thinking about the future of this country.”

This was one of the biggest election upsets in history, so of course everyone is stunned. Me too. Switching among three cable news networks and several websites I wondered: Is he really going to take Florida so easily? Did they just call North Carolina for Trump? Can he possibly win Wisconsin? Pennsylvania? Yup.

I rooted for Mitt Romney in 2012 and John McCain in 2008. I ran for the school board in Hoboken, N.J., and lost once before winning the following year. I know what it’s like to have your hopes puddle up on the floor like that dollop of election-night Haagen-Dazs that you dropped and you just don’t care to wipe up. What does it matter? All is lost. You want to announce on Twitter that you are in bed letting the tears stream down your face.

I saw this result coming over the summer. In July, five police officers were ambushed in Dallas and three more were killed in Baton Rouge. In August, Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback, sat out the national anthem. In September, an Islamic terrorist, masquerading as a fried chicken salesman in my hometown, Elizabeth, N.J., set off bombs in New York and New Jersey. Mrs. Clinton proclaimed: “I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police.” She put half of Trump’s supporters in that “basket of deplorables.”

People I know were angry. They were tired of being told they were racist and bigoted as they went about the business of mowing their lawns, writing college tuition checks and working their jobs as cops, secretaries and teachers’ aides. They kept being told they needed to look inward, examine their sins and judge themselves guilty. They had not forgotten when Barack Obama was running for president in 2008 and his wife, Michelle, said, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country…”

So now we have President-Elect Donald Trump. I supported him because he promised to curb regulations, cut taxes and appoint constitutionalists to the Supreme Court. I supported him because Mrs. Clinton doesn’t have what it takes to turn around a stagnant economy or stand up to the special interests that block innovation.

In his victory speech, Mr. Trump lifted a line from Abraham Lincoln and spoke of “binding wounds.” I wanted him to be gracious and kind in that moment, and he was. My 89-year-old mother is still appalled by my vote and tells me, with a laugh, that she’s moving to Ireland. And one of my disappointed female friends on Facebook — who, like me is white and college-educated — wrote, “Obama helped expose the deeply racist nature of our country. Trump exposes the anti-intellectual, sexist xenophobia.”

But most of my friends, some of whom I suspect cast votes like mine, have stayed quiet. I guess it’s still not politically correct to admit that you are on the Trump train.

Maureen Sullivan writes about education at Forbes.com.

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A view of the Washington Monument from the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.Credit
Jabin Botsford/The New York Times

Worst-case scenario in the next four years: fascism, a wall, mass deportations, the end of Obamacare, a Trump brand on the White House and either a trade war or an actual war with China (since war is the easiest diversion from domestic unhappiness).

Best-case scenario: Ruth Bader Ginsburg refuses to retire or die, the Democratic Party finds a backbone, turns away from its fixation on the center and heeds the call for an economic revolt against the 1 percent, joined by Black Lives Matter, the Occupy movement, and resurgent feminism.

Both scenarios could happen at the same time.

The second scenario requires Democrats to put their status quo political model to rest. They already had a significant portion of the nonwhite minority vote locked up, but have lost too many working-class white people. Bernie Sanders might not have won over the wealthier whites who were voting with Trump against the seemingly rising tide of minorities, but he might have snared the white working class and some of the white middle class.

Here’s the bright side, for those, like me, who are on the liberal-to-left spectrum. If Hillary Clinton had won, she would have run again in 2020, which could have meant four more years of Wall Street liberalism and fire-and-forget perpetual warfare, conducted by drones and Special Operations over the horizon. Now perhaps Elizabeth Warren will be the 2020 Democratic candidate — a white woman, a feminist, and someone more progressive than Clinton.

But all this speaks largely about domestic electoral politics. The sickness of the American body politic remains untreated, and will remain untreated, or exacerbated, in a country run by clowns, conspirators, and collaborators.

That sickness is imperialism. America is an imperial country, and its decay might now be showing. The power that has brought so much benefit to the country — for white people — is now faltering in its ability to provide those benefits to all white people. The empire’s best hope is to be more inclusive, demographically and economically, but that runs counter to the imperial impulse to hoard power and profit.

Warren or someone like her might be better at extracting more social and economic justice for all Americans. But unless such a person finds a way to ease control from the financial-industrial complex, the prospects of halting our decline are weak.

Empires rot from the inside even as emperors blame the barbarians.

Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of the novel “The Sympathizer,” the winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize, and a book of nonfiction “Nothing Ever Dies.”

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Smog trapped in the valley of Sandy, Utah.Credit
George Frey/Bloomberg

Donald J. Trump once tweeted that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive.” Twitter messages may not be clear signs of likely public policies, but Mr. Trump followed up during the campaign with his “America First Energy Plan,” which would rescind all of President Obama’s actions on climate change.

The plan includes canceling United States participation in the Paris climate agreement and stopping all American funding of United Nations climate change programs. It also includes abandoning the Clean Power Plan, a mainstay of the Obama administration’s approach to achieving its emissions reduction target for carbon dioxide under the Paris agreement.

What should we make of such campaign promises? Taking Mr. Trump at his word, he will surely seek to pull the country out of the Paris pact. But because the agreement has already come into force, under the rules, any party must wait three years before requesting to withdraw, followed by a one-year notice period.

Those rules would seem to be mere technicalities. The incoming Trump administration simply can disregard America’s pledge to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 26 to 28 percent below the 2005 level by 2025. That is bad enough. But the big worry is what other key countries, including the world’s largest emitter, China, as well as India and Brazil, will do if the United States reneges on its pledge. The result could be that the Paris agreement unravels, taking it from the 97 percent of global emissions currently covered by the pact to little more than the European Union’s 10 percent share.

In addition, Mr. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency probably will stop work on regulations of methane emissions (a very potent greenhouse gas) from existing oil and gas operations. Undoing complex existing regulations, such as the Clean Power Plan, will be more difficult, but a reconstituted Supreme Court will probably help President Trump when that plan inevitably comes before the court. Also, the new president will most likely ask that the Keystone XL pipeline permit application be renewed — and facilitate other oil and gas pipelines around the country.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump promised to “bring back” the coal industry by cutting environmental regulations. That may not be so easy. The decline of that industry and related employment has been caused by technological changes in mining, and competition from low-priced natural gas for electricity generation, not by environmental regulations. At the same time, Mr. Trump has pledged to promote fracking for oil and gas, but that would make natural gas even more economically attractive, and accelerate the elimination of coal-sector jobs.

If he lives up to his campaign rhetoric, Mr. Trump may indeed be able to reverse course on climate change policy, increasing the threat to our planet, and in the process destroy much of the Obama legacy in this important realm. This will make the states even more important players on this critical issue.

Robert N. Stavins is a professor at Harvard, where he directs the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements.

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A neighborhood in Phoenixville, Penn., showing its support for Trump.Credit
Mark Makela for The New York Times

The real costs of a Donald J. Trump presidency will most likely come on the political rather than on the economic side.

We are likely to see some rise in trade barriers and unilateral economic policies. But for all his bluster, I do not expect Mr. Trump to engage in indiscriminate protectionism. We live in a world of supply chains where imposing tariffs on Mexican or Chinese imports will raise costs of United States businesses and make it hard for them to compete. Mr. Trump is a businessman, and he will understand soon, if he does not now, the senselessness of blanket protectionism.

We may have plenty of trade disputes with foreign countries. It’s useful to bear in mind here the example of the 1980s, when trade frictions with Japan and other leading exporters produced a slew of so-called new protectionist barriers such as voluntary export restraints. But these did very limited damage to the world economy. Before long, the world embarked on a further and more intense round of globalization.

Furthermore, we have robust international institutions, like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, that did not exist in the interwar period. And the political lobbies in favor of an open economy (big business and banks) are stronger and retain considerable influence in Washington.

So even though the 1930s parallel is on everyone’s mind, I do not think we are in for a collapse of the international economic order and a retreat into trade war.

The real danger Mr. Trump poses is the undermining of our politics — the norms that sustain our liberal democracies. His campaign was based on a divisive politics of identity. Ideals of equity, equal rights, diversity and inclusion were submerged under the weight of a rhetoric that raised racial and ethnic tensions and inflamed passions against imagined enemies — Mexican immigrants, Chinese exporters, Muslim refugees.

Illiberal democracy has been the bane of several nations around the world. Under Mr. Trump, the traditions in the United States of checks and balances and of rule of law will be tested seriously.

The political danger will be greatly magnified by Mr. Trump’s likely economic failure. He comes into office as the putative leader of middle and lower classes who feel they have been left behind. He has raised their expectations in ways that he cannot meet. There is little chance that incomes at the middle and lower end of income distribution will receive a large boost under his policies. The manufacturing jobs that have left will not return no matter how tough Mr. Trump’s trade policies get. These jobs have disappeared for good, largely thanks to technological changes, and not trade.

When the full scale of his economic disappointment sinks in sometime during his term, Mr. Trump may well react in the time-honored fashion of global populists like President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. To keep his base mobilized and insulate himself from economic troubles, he may take shelter in an intensified form of the identity politics that worked so well for him during the presidential campaign. This would rip American society further apart along racial and ethnic cleavages.

The ugliness that characterized politics during the presidential campaign may be nothing compared with what may be yet to come.

Dani Rodrik, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, is the author of “Economic Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science” and “The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy.”

Financial markets regained their footing on Wednesday, as investors and traders apparently concluded that a Donald Trump presidency might not be so bad after all. Instead of focusing on how unprepared Mr. Trump is to be president, several traders quoted in the media talked about how deregulation from ending Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank financial reforms — two Republican goals — could lift stock prices for health care companies and banks. They took special solace in Mr. Trump’s promise to boost government spending on infrastructure and in the measured tones of his acceptance speech.

Unfortunately, there is no escaping the overarching conclusion that Mr. Trump’s campaign promises, if carried out, would harm the economy. His proposed rollback of Dodd-Frank reforms would invite renewed recklessness. His opposition to Obamacare would renew and intensify households’ financial insecurity. His proposed tax cuts for the rich would exacerbate income inequality, while either blowing a hole in the deficit or requiring deep budget cuts. His stance on trade would impair international commerce and cooperation. His proposed deportation of immigrants would unleash a legal and humanitarian crisis.

Even his popular call for more infrastructure spending is flawed. In and of itself, Mr. Trump’s pledge to borrow vast sums to spend on infrastructure would be a sensible move at this time of low interest rates. But vastly increased federal indebtedness in addition to his other harmful economic policies would be piling risk on top of risk.

Risk-taking that crosses the line into recklessness can be immensely profitable in the short run, which is what many traders care most about. But it is no way to run an economy on which everyone else depends for long-term prosperity.

Now it looks like a warning shot. When Justice Antonin Scalia died in February, Donald Trump was among the first to call for stonewalling President Obama’s choice to fill the seat.

“It’s called delay, delay, delay,” he said at the opening of the Republican presidential debate on Feb. 13. Senator Harry Reid, the minority leader, countered that it would be “unprecedented in recent history” for the Supreme Court to go a year without a full complement of justices. But other Republicans, chief among them the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, agreed with Mr. Trump and Senator Ted Cruz: Justice Scalia’s seat should remain vacant until after the election.

Undeterred (what else was he supposed to be?), President Obama nominated Merrick Garland, a seasoned judge praised in the past by Republicans like Senator Orrin Hatch. A debate ensued over historical facts, which seems quaintly polite in retrospect. Since 1900, had the Senate ever refused to confirm a nominee in a presidential election year as a result of the impending election? The answer was no (even if Mr. Cruz tried to argue, against the facts, that Justice Anthony Kennedy wasn’t confirmed in the election year of 1988.) The Republicans’ refusal to grant Judge Garland a hearing or schedule a vote was in fact unprecedented.

It was a new kind of hardball.

And it succeeded. For a blip in August, Republicans took a hit in the polls for obstructing the Garland nomination. But the moment passed, blown away in the chaos and battle of the presidential election. Judge Garland slipped from view. The parties adapted to a new reality in which both expected either his postelection, pre-inauguration confirmation, or a new nominee chosen by the next president. When they assumed Hillary Clinton would win, Republicans including Senators John McCain of Arizona and Richard Burr of North Carolina talked about blocking Democratic Supreme Court picks indefinitely. Both were re-elected Tuesday and will return to a Senate still controlled by the Republicans.

It’s hard to see how any Republican paid a price for radically altering the norms for Supreme Court appointments. Mr. Trump helped point the way, and the voters rewarded him and those who followed.

Choosing a justice in Antonin Scalia’s mold, as he has promised, will allow Mr. Trump to prove himself to the social conservatives for whom the court, and Roe v. Wade, are the defining issues. Under the current rules, Democrats could filibuster his choice, but if that happens, how long will those rules last?
Mr. Trump’s election has already run over far stronger traditions and norms.

Next comes the question of how many additional Supreme Court appointments will come his way. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 83. Anthony Kennedy is 80. Stephen Breyer is 78. In Supreme Court terms, four years is a long time.

Emily Bazelon is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and a fellow at Yale Law School.

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A Trump campaign event in Clive, Iowa.Credit
Damon Winter/The New York Times

To say that Donald Trump’s victory was a shock may qualify as the understatement of the century. The polls were wrong. The experts were wrong. I was wrong. Almost everyone was wrong — including those in the Trump campaign who expected to lose.

His victory wasn’t just a surprise; it was an event of gigantic dimensions, its radiating effects incalculable. Mr. Trump’s win ranks among the most unlikely and stunning elections in American history. Regardless of how the Trump presidency turns out, this race will be studied a century from now.

For those of us who have been vehement critics of Mr. Trump, this is a rather challenging moment. Starting on Jan. 20, he will be the only president we have. He now has a democratic legitimacy we may regret but cannot deny, and there is such a thing as democratic grace. To those who are tempted only to rage and attack and lament what has occurred, a word of counsel to them, and to myself: We need to give Mr. Trump the chance to rise to the moment, as unlikely as we think that may be.

At the same time, we can’t possibly erase the history of the last 17 months — the words he said, the things he did, the conspiracy theories he wove, the ignorance, volatility and cruelty he showed — and our concerns aren’t going to evaporate now that he’s about to be in charge of the nuclear triad that during the campaign he didn’t even know existed.

I believed, and still believe, that he is a man with a disordered personality and authoritarian tendencies. My job is to give him a chance to prove me wrong; his job is to prove me wrong.

Among my worries is that Mr. Trump’s victory will validate his style of politics, his serrated rhetoric. The way he mistreats people will be normalized. This election has brought us to dark places. Rather than this approach being repudiated it will, for many, become a model. “All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off,” in the words of Edmund Burke.

If the Trump campaign foreshadows his presidency, America under Trump will be fundamentally different than it has been — coarser, less temperate and civilized, more inward and resentful. The Republican Party will fundamentally change, from a conservative party to one that champions European-style ethnic nationalism. (The Democratic Party, whose members were certain Hillary Clinton would win, will be convulsed as it enters a period of intense recrimination.)

A few hours after Mr. Trump was declared the winner, I received a note from a friend of mine, the distinguished Christian writer Philip Yancey, who told me, “I’m surprised and befuddled, but not scared, thanks to the checks-and-balances strength of American democracy. I tremble, though, to think what an unpredictable leader offers to a world in growing crisis.” He added, “Some say God moves in mysterious ways. I say, God grants humans the freedom to move in even more mysterious ways.”

What happened on Nov. 8th was a mystery that may lead to calamity. I hope to God it won’t.

Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, served in the last three Republican administrations and is a contributing opinion writer.

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Naiya Johnson, left, and Sierra Taylor, students at the Community College of Philadelphia.Credit
Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times

I spent the days leading up to the election in Pennsylvania talking to some young voters, 18, 19, 20 years old. They wore flowered Doc Martens, fake fur coats, earbuds dangling from one ear. Overwhelmingly, they were open and polite. They were smart. They were angry at a political system they felt ignored them, but they hoped for better days ahead.

In January, Donald Trump will be their next president.

Many of these young people supported Mr. Trump. Many did so reluctantly. One young Trump supporter told me that no one knows exactly what Mr. Trump will do in office. Another described hesitating while filling out his absentee ballot, wondering if he could vote for a man who had made abhorrent comments about women. But some voted for Mr. Trump enthusiastically.

Those who supported Hillary Clinton were disgusted by Mr. Trump and what he stands for. Today, they’re dealing with a new reality they didn’t expect.

I’m thinking of Bria Blackshear, a 20-year-old Temple University student who had waited more than an hour at her polling place in north Philadelphia. “Donald Trump doesn’t represent the ideals I would want for this country,” she said.

I’m thinking of Brooke Renner, 18, also a Temple student, who was waiting in line for a second time. She’d given up earlier, but was back and willing to wait as long as it took to cast her vote for Mrs. Clinton. Otherwise, she said, “I’d feel personally responsible if Donald Trump wins.”

I’m thinking of Sierra Taylor, a 19-year-old student at the Community College of Philadelphia, who said, “black people feel like our votes don’t matter.” I’m thinking of her friend Naiya Johnson, 22, who, when asked about her hopes for the next four years, said, “I hope we make it.”

I’m also thinking of the young people I saw debating the issues that matter to them. Of the table full of young men at Bucks County Community College arguing about Mr. Trump when one, the quietest, spoke up to say, “Trump has no respect for women.” Of the young man, who, as his friend criticized Mrs. Clinton’s record as secretary of state, interjected that Mr. Trump is racist, sexist and xenophobic. They’d had the argument once before, they said. I hope they keep talking. I think they will.

It’s a frightening time to grow up. But these young voters are clear-eyed about the shortcomings of government and optimistic enough to imagine a better world. They can make friends with people of different viewpoints, and, when it matters, they can challenge their friends to think in a new way.

Anna North is a member of the editorial board.

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Trump supporters at a rally in Scranton, Penn., in July.Credit
Todd Heisler/The New York Times

BRODHEADSVILLE, Pa. — Thinking back now, I can’t for the life of me figure out how I got it so wrong.

He seemed so troubled by what he was about to do, as if he knew it was a mistake, but one he felt compelled to make. The way I read the pained look on his face, I thought he was almost apologizing; maybe seeking a kind of absolution.

It was just a few days before the election, and I had been canvassing for the Democrats. I wasn’t out there because I was a particularly ardent Clinton supporter. She had certainly not been my first choice, my second or even my third. I’m one of those middle-aged white men without a college degree who had been holding out for Joe Biden to change his mind. But I felt as if I had an obligation to make certain that, at least in my little corner of Pennsylvania, a man who was, to my mind, so obviously unsuited to the highest office in the world, was not just defeated, but repudiated. I expected that my neighbors and friends and the strangers down the road would do just that.

Sure, I could feel and even share their frustration over the fact that the longest postwar economic recovery had left so many of my neighbors behind. I had been left behind, too. And yes, I understood the fear of an uncertain world, and the stress of profound cultural changes that were upending so many things that my neighbors took as bedrock values. But I thought the character traits that had always defined the people I knew in eastern Pennsylvania — true conservatives with a sense of responsibility and decency — would in the end lead them to reject “Trumpism,” whatever that actually is.

My job wasn’t to help Clinton win. I thought — or at least the pundits were telling me — that was a done deal. The way I saw it, my only task was to drive up her margins and to do that, I was working off a carefully curated list of likely Clinton voters thoughtfully provided to me by the local campaign office.

And so when I knocked on this gentleman’s door on a back road in the rural, conservative West End of Monroe County, and he told me that he was indeed planning on voting for Donald Trump, I was ready to simply turn away. But he wouldn’t let me go.

“I just can’t trust her,” he said. He made eye contact and kept it. Relentlessly. He and I were of the same rough demographic. Just like me, he was well into his 50s, with teeth that had seen better days. Just like me, he was lower middle class, judging from his surroundings.

And as he rattled off a list of shopworn talking points — Benghazi, emails, pay for play — I felt as if I was hearing a stranger’s confession. I felt as if he wanted me to understand and forgive him for what he was about to do. I remember thinking to myself that when this was over, I was going to have to find a way to build a bridge back to this guy who was, in so many ways, just like me.

Such was my arrogance.

Late last night, as I watched Pennsylvania turn red for the first time in a generation, I kept thinking back to that man, and how I so misread his expression and his words. It wasn’t sorrow etched in his face. It was pity. For me. Because he knew, long before I did, how wrong I was.

—Seamus McGraw is the author of “Betting the Farm on a Drought.”

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To Roosevelt, the “forgotten man” encompassed the industrial worker and struggling farmer and Keynesian consumer — ordinary citizens without whom a modern economy would falter.Credit
Ross MacDonald

In his victory speech last night, Donald J. Trump paid homage to “the forgotten men and women of our country,” vowing that they “will be forgotten no longer.” This essential political idea — that a vast segment of the nation’s white citizens have been overlooked, or looked down upon — has driven every major realignment in American politics since the New Deal.

In 1932, at the darkest moment of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt evoked the “forgotten man” as a reason to rebuild the economy from the “bottom up.” More than three decades later, after Richard Nixon’s 1968 victory, the journalist Peter Schrag identified the “Forgotten American” — the white “lower middle class” voter — as the key to the nation’s apparent rejection of the Great Society and the New Deal order. “In the guise of the working class — or the American yeoman or John Smith — he was once the hero of the civic books, the man that Andrew Jackson called ‘the bone and sinew of the country,’ ” Mr. Schrag wrote. “Now he is ‘the forgotten man,’ perhaps the most alienated person in America.”

That this “forgotten” American could be used both to uphold and to dismantle liberalism suggests that this American political identity has never been especially fixed: Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, but populist above all. Since the 1960s, the phrase has also implied that the country was paying too much attention to the wrong sorts of people — most notably, to African-Americans — at the expense of the white working class.
It is no coincidence that the “forgotten men and women of our country” began their migration into the Republican Party at the very moment that African-Americans were asserting their right to vote, and voting Democratic, in large numbers for the first time. Mr. Trump’s victory will go down as one of the great upsets in United States history, but it is also the product of a long and bitter struggle over race and class in this country.

The Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner is often credited with coining the term “forgotten man.” Writing near the dawn of the Progressive Era, he lamented the lost autonomy of hard-working citizens suddenly forced to pay for high-flown programs of social reform. Sumner’s most famous political essay, “What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other,” rejected the very idea that government might mitigate class antagonisms by sharing the social wealth. What did social classes owe to each other? Not much, in Sumner’s view. And his “forgotten man” owed the least of all.

In his 1932 campaign for the presidency, Roosevelt sought to claim the term for a different and more expansive purpose. “These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten,” he said in a radio address from Albany in April 1932, for plans “that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”

To Roosevelt, the “forgotten man” encompassed the industrial worker and struggling farmer and Keynesian consumer — ordinary citizens without whom a modern economy would falter. He built the New Deal around this image, establishing the minimum wage, Social Security and the federal right to organize unions. Those reforms cemented the loyalty of the white working class to the Democratic Party for a generation.

But the New Deal also “forgot” — or excluded — many people, including African-Americans. When the Great Society came along, Lyndon Johnson tried to make up for that by expanding federal programs serving the poor and by championing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. As the country started to “remember” its long-delayed promises of equality, however, the “forgotten American” began to emerge as term of exclusion and resistance to change. “There is hardly a language to describe him, or even a set of social statistics,” Mr. Schrag wrote in his August 1969 essay, “The Forgotten American.” “Just names: racist-bigot-redneck-ethnic-Irish-Italian-Pole-Hunkie-Yahoo. The lower middle class. A blank.”

As Mr. Schrag noted, all of that name-calling was part of the problem, a refusal on the part of liberal elites to recognize the real grievances and desires of what had once been a bedrock Democratic constituency. In the 1968 campaign, Nixon capitalized on this resentment with calls for “law and order,” a phrase that evoked not only fears of crime, but also anger at protesters and rioters and the college-campus liberals who tolerated them. Mr. Trump put that phrase back into political circulation in 2016, a gesture of solidarity with the old ways of thinking about the “silent majority” — and the “forgotten American.” And though he included “men and women” in his victory speech, Mr. Trump’s campaign mobilized around the same image that once animated the Roosevelt coalition: the “forgotten” white working-class man.

Race, too, remains an indelible part of today’s conversation about who has been “forgotten” and who deserves to be seen. To dismiss this language as simple racism, however, is to miss at least some of its political significance. What happened in the late 1960s and 1970s was not only that the Republican Party reclaimed and redefined Roosevelt’s “forgotten man” for a more conservative age. During those years, the Democratic Party itself began to turn away from the New Deal and its working-class politics, especially from its commitment to organized labor.

With Mr. Trump’s election, we may be witnessing the rise of a new party system, with the Democrats now the standard-bearers of racial tolerance and free-market globalization, and the Republicans the party of nationalist populist revolt. But as Roosevelt showed, this need not be a fixed political equation. If the 2016 election marks the final, gasping end of the New Deal coalition, it should also mark the start of a new reckoning within the Democratic Party.

LONDON — You can’t throw a peanut in a Westminster pub without hitting an obsessive follower of American politics. Start a conversation about “The West Wing” with any member of Parliament and expect to get a long disquisition on that American political drama’s best episodes. During Britain’s last general election, in 2015, both main political parties here proudly boasted about being advised by veterans of Barack Obama’s campaign.

Until now, our Americophilia has been unrequited. Then in August, Donald J. Trump declared himself “Mr. Brexit.” For Mr. Trump and his supporters, Britain’s vote in June to leave the European Union was evidence of a growing popular revolt against multiculturalism, porous borders and political elites. If the British electorate could deliver a result that baffled its financial sector, its scientists and metropolitan liberals – and was not widely predicted by pollsters – couldn’t the same sort of upset happen in America?

It just did. Mr. Trump’s victory feels like a flashback to June, although where Brexit divided members of Britain’s political class, the American election results have united them. Politicians of the mainstream right and left alike are dumbfounded that the United States would elect someone who uses the extreme language Mr. Trump does and who seems to have little love for institutions like NATO.

Last December, Britain’s former Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, described Mr. Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims entering America as “divisive, stupid and wrong.” The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan of the Labour Party, has called the president-elect’s views on Islam “ignorant.” Apart from Nigel Farage, the face of the far-right U.K. Independence Party, it is difficult to find a British politician with a good word to say about Mr. Trump.

Nationalism, white anger and protectionism are now driving politics in Britain and across Europe. The sound is of doors slamming. Brexit felt like a referendum on border control, and on rapid demographic change among white communities that felt themselves deprived of attention and resources. It is tempting to draw comparisons with the United States: The big cities in both Britain and the United States, which are most diverse, are also most relaxed about that diversity. In smaller communities, immigration feels more disruptive.

There are other parallels. Mr. Trump’s victory was driven by older, white voters, who were struggling but not destitute. He won white men without college degrees by a landslide. A typical Leave supporter has a similar demographic profile. Such voters are on the decline, as both Britain and the United States become more diverse and younger generations are better-educated, and more open to immigration and change. But as both the Brexit vote and Mr. Trump’s victory showed, they are far from a spent force.

Women, as Hillary Clinton showed this morning, know how to absorb pain. And Mrs. Clinton has had plenty of practice about how to stand before the cameras after public humiliation.

Clearly, she needed time to compose herself. She made no appearances overnight, instead calling Donald J. Trump to concede. But when she strode onstage in purple and gray, Bill Clinton behind her in a purple tie, her voice did not waver.

Women seldom have the luxury of giving in to pain. Many have children or grandchildren or aging parents to tend, whether they themselves are sick or in emotional turmoil.

So Mrs. Clinton faced her despondent campaign staff and her despondent half of the country and tried to rally them. She spoke most directly to young people, and to women and girls. She had hoped to stand before them as a symbol of all that women could achieve. Now she had to demonstrate once again what women can endure.

It was hard not to recall her standing beside Bill Clinton after the whole world knew graphic and humiliating details about the affairs he had denied having.

“To all the women and especially the young women who put their faith in me I want you to know that nothing has made me prouder than to be your champion,” she said, and here she had to clear her throat. “I know we still have not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling but some day somebody will, and hopefully sooner than we might think right now.”

It’s difficult to know right now all that stood in the way of shattering that ceiling. Was it a woman, or this woman? Was it Mrs. Clinton as symbol of the Washington establishment, as a consummate insider in a time of profound distrust of the elite?

We do know that voters disproportionately punish women who are seen as dishonest. We do know that it’s hard for strong, assertive and ambitious women to be seen as likable and competent at the same time.

Political scientists and cultural commentators will long debate what happened in this election, to this woman and to many women. The question is whether the image of Mrs. Clinton, composed and gracious in defeat, persevering through pain, will inspire women to try again?

Susan Chira is a senior correspondent and editor on gender issues for The New York Times.

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Traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange the morning after the presidential election.Credit
Richard Drew/Associated Press

Markets always move after seismic events, like the unexpected election of Donald J. Trump. Still, market moves need to be interpreted. Even if you believe that markets are right, it’s not always obvious what they’re saying.

One way to think about the market’s gyrations is the idea of mean and variation. When Barack Obama (a.k.a. No Drama Obama) was elected president, it was possible to anticipate — correctly, it turned out — that he would help steer America back onto a course of steady growth, low inflation and falling unemployment. Think of that as the Obama mean: the baseline expectation. When the stock market expects good things like that, it tends to rise, just as it has during the Obama presidency.

But the variation is just as important as the mean. Mr. Obama didn’t always give the markets what they wanted, but by the same token he was always clear about what he was going to do. He promised them something much more valuable: a low-risk upward economic trajectory.

Mr. Trump is the exact opposite of Mr. Obama. His baseline is worse, for starters: to establish expectations for his presidency, you have to factor in his hugely irresponsible fiscal policy, potential trade wars and maybe even reckless brinkmanship over repaying the national debt. Put those things together, and a severe recession becomes possible.

But it gets even worse because Mr. Trump is by his nature highly unpredictable. However bad you think he’s going to be, it’s entirely possible that your prediction will turn out to be ridiculously optimistic. Mr. Trump has vastly more downside risk than Mr. Obama ever had, and so markets are going to trade at a discount to his already-discounted baseline.

If you transition, then, from low-risk positive expectations to high-risk negative expectations, you have to expect the markets to take some precipitous plunges along the way.

Much of that will be noise. The markets always fluctuate randomly in the short term, and there’s no point in trying to read anything meaningful into those moves. That’s why it’s dangerous to read too much into midnight stock-market futures trading, or a sudden plunge in the value of the Mexican peso once it becomes obvious that Mr. Trump will become president.

Those moves might be a rational response to the lower expected value of the assets in question. On the other hand, they might just be the result of panicky hedging — or indeed they could simply represent dealers second-guessing and trying to outmaneuver one another.

Once the market has been trading steadily for a few months, its general direction under the auspices of the new government is going to be pretty clear. Fluctuations over just a few hours, by contrast, are much harder to read. They might look like signals — but all too often they turn out to be nothing but noise. And as we’ve learned during this long, brutal election, separating noise from signals can be a very tricky business.

Felix Salmon is a senior editor at Fusion.

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A group of Trump supporters calling themselves the Mesa County Deplorables sharing a potluck meal in Grand Junction, Colo., in October.Credit
Nick Cote for The New York Times

It turns out that shaming the supporters of Donald J. Trump is not a good political strategy.

Though job loss and economic stagnation played a role in his victory, so did shame. As the principal investigator on a study of the middle class for the National Institute of Mental Health, I found that working people’s stress is often intensified by shame at their failure to “make it” in what they are taught is a meritocratic American economy.

The right has been very successful at persuading working people that they are vulnerable not because they themselves have failed, but because of the selfishness of some other villain (African-Americans, feminists, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, liberals, progressives; the list keeps growing).

Instead of challenging this ideology of shame, the left has buttressed it by blaming white people as a whole for slavery, genocide of the Native Americans and a host of other sins, as though whiteness itself was something about which people ought to be ashamed. The rage many white working-class people feel in response is rooted in the sense that once again, as has happened to them throughout their lives, they are being misunderstood.

So please understand what is happening here. Many Trump supporters very legitimately feel that it is they who have been facing an unfair reality. The upper 20 percent of income earners, many of them quite liberal and rightly committed to the defense of minorities and immigrants, also believe in the economic meritocracy and their own right to have so much more than those who are less fortunate. So while they may be progressive on issues of discrimination against the obvious victims of racism and sexism, they are blind to their own class privilege and to the hidden injuries of class that are internalized by much of the country as self-blame.

The right’s ability to portray liberals as elitists is further strengthened by the phobia toward religion that prevails in the left. Many religious people are drawn by the teachings of their tradition to humane values and caring about the oppressed. Yet they often find that liberal culture is hostile to religion of any sort, believing it is irrational and filled with hate. People on the left rarely open themselves to the possibility that there could be a spiritual crisis in society that plays a role in the lives of many who feel misunderstood and denigrated by the fancy intellectuals and radical activists.

The left needs to stop ignoring people’s inner pain and fear. The racism, sexism and xenophobia used by Mr. Trump to advance his candidacy does not reveal an inherent malice in the majority of Americans. If the left could abandon all this shaming, it could rebuild its political base by helping Americans see that much of people’s suffering is rooted in the hidden injuries of class and in the spiritual crisis that the global competitive marketplace generates.

Democrats need to become as conscious and articulate about the suffering caused by classism as we are about other forms of suffering. We need to reach out to Trump voters in a spirit of empathy and contrition. Only then can we help working people understand that they do not live in a meritocracy, that their intuition that the system is rigged is correct (but it is not by those whom they had been taught to blame) and that their pain and rage is legitimate.

Michael Lerner, the rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue in Berkeley, Calif., is the editor of Tikkun magazine and chairman of the Network of Spiritual Progressives.